REVISITING NATIONAL EU COORDINATION AFTER LISBON AND AN ERA OF CRISIS PANEL 2

Abstract

How governments manage their interaction with the European Union (EU) is important domestically, where governments need to demonstrate that they are effective representatives at the EU level, where legislatures frequently complain that governments have overreached and failed, and where Eurosceptic voices place governments under intense scrutiny. It is also a key, if often overlooked dimension of EU governance, which influences the functioning of EU institutions, the speed of EU policy-making, and the implementation and enforcement of EU policies (Spanou 1994). Indeed, for some scholars the pace or possibility of European integration begins at home (Marks and Hooghe 2008), while for others the national coordination of EU policy arguably delimits the administrative capacity of the EU as a system (Metcalfe 1994). Although the existing scholarship offers many useful insights into the approaches adopted by member states, it has yet to take account systematically of important developments over the past decade or so. The Lisbon Treaty not only separated the European Council from the Council of the EU and created a semi-permanent President of the European Council, but gave national parliaments a new role and further empowered regional actors. Moreover, changes in the technology of EU governance in the form of the expansion of the European Semester in response to the Eurozone crisis, the Covid pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has imposed new requirements on the member states. This second panel brings together papers from a new project led by Eva Heidbreder and Hussein Kassim that revisits national EU coordination. As well as the systematic analysis and comparison of coordination in all 27 EU member states, the project offers new conceptual and empirical perspectives on how governments have responded to the changes outlined above. It also investigates how three non-member states (Norway, Switzerland, and the UK) manage their interaction with the EU.

Title	Details
Changes and Continuity in the National Coordination of EU Policy in Spain	View Paper Details
National coordination of EU policy in Belgium: from de iure competitive to de facto cooperative under European pressure.	View Paper Details
National Coordination of European Policy: The case of Norway	View Paper Details
National EU coordination in the UK: from member state to withdrawn state	View Paper Details